A black hound the size of a calf, with eyes like burning coals, that has walked the lanes and shorelines of Norfolk and Suffolk for as long as anyone has told stories there.
Every corner of East Anglia knows the black dog. On the Norfolk coast he is Old Shuck, padding along the cliff paths between Cromer and Overstrand. In Suffolk he haunts churchyards, crossroads and the long lanes between villages. His name is usually traced to the Old English scucca, a demon, or to the dialect word shucky, meaning shaggy. Some say he has a single eye in the middle of his head. Most agree that to meet him is a bad omen, and that to look him in the eye is worse.
On Sunday 4 August 1577 he stopped being a story. A storm broke over Suffolk during morning service, and at St Mary's in Bungay a great black dog ran through the church among the kneeling congregation. Two worshippers died where they knelt. The same morning, a dozen miles away at Holy Trinity in Blythburgh, the dog burst in again. The steeple came crashing through the roof, a man and a boy were killed, and the creature left by the north door.
This black dog, or the divel in such a likenesse... runing all along down the body of the church with great swiftnesse, and incredible haste, among the people, in a visible fourm and shape...
Abraham Fleming, A Straunge and Terrible Wunder, 1577
Scorch marks are still on that north door at Blythburgh, and the village has called them the devil's fingerprints ever since. Bungay put the black dog on its town sign and its weathervane. Whatever ran through those churches, East Anglia never let it go.
